Haiti, Three Months Later

Dr. Jon LaPook took these images while visiting Port-au-Prince and Port-de-Paix, April 5-9, 2010. He writes:

Collapsed, pancaked, and crumbling buildings are everywhere. Significant spending on rebuilding has not yet begun because there's nobody to spend it. The best hope for action is the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission co-chaired by President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. But the Haitian parliament is still in the process of approving this commission.

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This sign at a shop in Port-au-Prince made me laugh. Haitians have uncanny resilience.

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Every park is filled with tents. Families live in terrible conditions with little clean water and food but try to resume some semblance of their daily activities.

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This gives you an idea of how packed the parks are with tents. And, of course, there's little privacy.

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"Doctors Without Borders" runs a camp that takes care of people injured in the earthquake. Both physical and psychological issues are addressed.

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"Partners in Health" helps care for people in the largest tent camp in Haiti (Parc Jean Marie Vincent), containing about 50,000 people displaced by the earthquake. They have created a makeshift medical clinic there which is staffed entirely by 70-100 Haitians, depending on the day. It is a small miracle, but faces shortages of space, supplies and manpower.

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Inside Parc Jean Marie Vincent, children try to return to playing games and being children.

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In Port-au-Prince, Haitians try to resume commerce. But there are shortages of everything.

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A tent park with an estimated two thousand people has three outdoor showers with flaps that don't totally close.

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Inside a tent park, a woman washes her clothes.

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In Port-au-Prince, a young girl is fed at a facility run by a mission.

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Next-door neighbors at Parc Jean Marie Vincent in Port-au-Prince. A family of five lives in a room measuring about 8-by-12 feet.

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By 8 a.m., 400 patients are lined up at the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission near rural Port-de-Paix, about 100 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince. It has one of the best medical clinics in the region, which is the poorest in Haiti.

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Long lines at the medical clinic at the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission near Port-de-Paix. Since the earthquake, about 50,000 people have moved up north to Port-de-Paix from Port-au-Prince, further straining an area that was already the poorest in Haiti.

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Waiting to be seen at the medical clinic.

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This used to be the Ministry of Health in Port-de-Paix. Rebuilding it will be the easy part. The hard part will be creating  for the very first time  an effective public health system.

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At the public hospital in Port-de-Paix, Dr. Milton Usnel is seeing about 40 patients a day in the clinic. His patients don't have enough food or medicine. Inside the hospital, the only toilets are outdoor latrines. When I visited the hospital at 8 p.m., there were no nurses in the emergency room; children were being tended by their families.

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At the public hospital in Port-de-Paix, a patient waits to be seen in the clinic.

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On the road to Port-de-Paix, CBS producer Nichole Marks and I saw this stream filled with junk and burning tires. In the far background, a child stands in the middle of the stench and garbage.

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Clean water is a huge problem in Haiti. With the rainy season here, health experts expect an increase in problems such as malaria, dysentery, and lung infections.

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The entire side of this Port-au-Prince house was wide open.

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In Port-au-Prince, Haitians tried to resume commerce.

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A large tent camp in Port-au-Prince. Medical care at the camp is provided by a non-governmental organization (NGO) called World Vision.

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Most of the tents are not waterproof. As the rainy season progresses, experts predict an increase in wet, muddy conditions leading to increased mosquito breeding and associated mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and dengue fever.